Full Title: Community Resilience Options: A Menu for Enhancing Local Energy Resilience
Author(s): Alexandra Kramer, Scott Belding, and Kamyria Coney
Publisher(s): National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Publication Date: May 15, 2023
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Description (excerpt):
This document highlights areas of potential community resilience improvements, especially those that relate to clean energy deployment for communities and municipalities. While there is no single resilience solution that will apply to every community or geographic location, there is a need for resilience solutions as a best practice. This document introduces 10 high-level categories of resilience-enhancing energy-related projects, intended for community members, planners, and decision-makers new to the topic to build their understanding of which solutions fit their community best. System resilience leads to community resilience by neutralizing threats, minimizing disruptions, and providing enhanced day-to-day security and social cohesion for community members.
The categories in this document focus primarily on community-scale measures and different options may be available at larger scales. Community resilience can also mean increasing community equity, capacity, socio-economic health, and social network robustness as a whole. Although those goals might be co-benefits of some of energy resilience strategies highlighted in this document, this document does not specifically cover methods for increasing community resilience through a social lens and is instead centered on resilience to acute disruptions. Full implementation of the measures described here requires in-depth, site-specific considerations that go beyond the scope of this document.